Friends, have you noticed how the Left's talking points are increasingly reliant not on rational arguments but appeals to crass emotionalism? The critique (if it can be called that) of President Trump's "family separation" policy was a notable case in point. How the mighty are fallen, I say. It's inconceivable that Walter Cronkite or even Dan Rather in his prime would have hidden behind a crying child instead of making a rational argument about the issues of the day. No more. It's a race to the bottom, and the bottom, it appears, is replete with bawling youngsters. Expect to see a lot more of them in primetime.
Read all about it in my latest article, coming soon to a news website or a newspaper near you...
The Left's Last Resort: Crying
Children
It seems that,
having exhausted all rational and pseudo-rational arguments –
without having made even a small dent in Republicans' support for
President Trump – leftists are increasingly reducing their talking
points and their life philosophy to one simple idea: Donald Trump is
despicable because he makes babies cry. How, you may well ask, did we
get to this point in our national discourse? It is particularly
remarkable given how fond liberals are of reminding us of their
superior intelligence and unfailing devotion to “logic”. Both
points are belied by what we have seen in recent weeks.
One could argue
that, when the great machine of leftism can only continue to function
by lubricating itself with children's tears, this is a sure sign that
the movement has become truly desperate. This may be true, and yet
the recent fixation with (misleading and even staged) images of
miserable kids at the U.S.-Mexican border is arguably just a further
elaboration of a long-dominant theme in leftist politics: the cult of
the victim. Surely, liberals opine, whomever has suffered is entitled
to our sympathy, and to some kind of restitution. (You can see why
trial lawyers lean left!) Since, moreover, leftists invariably think
in terms of groups, for them the primacy of victimhood means
essentially this: they should have a monopoly on deciding which
groups are most deserving of compassion, indulgence, and
gratification, based on their relative positions in the hierarchy of
suffering and oppression. Now, if one buys into this spurious logic,
then needless to say it becomes extremely important for each group to
make its claims to victimhood as loudly and as emotively as possible.
And so we find ourselves witnessing, to our universal consternation,
a nightly parade of crying babies in our “news” broadcasts.
Nothing could make greater sense, from a leftist perspective.
But why illegal
immigrants? Surely the Left could find a group better suited to
victim/hero status than a mass of people united by no common bond
except their failure to adhere to U.S. immigration laws... Not
necessarily!
Illegal
immigrants have long appealed to the Left as an aggrieved minority.
The fact that they are potential voters and usually reliable
Democrats doesn't hurt their cause, of course, but it is their robust
victimhood and sheer downtroddenness that really earns the liberal's
respect. Nonetheless, the Left's current position – that no illegal
immigrant parent should ever be separated from his or her child, when
U.S. servicemen as well as Americans charged with crimes are accorded
no such accommodation – is an extraordinary logical leap, even if,
like a good liberal, one assumes that “victims” should have
superior rights to “oppressors”. Again, though, one must
understand that it isn't logic that sustains this thinking in the
first place. It is instead the drumbeat repetition of images (and
even audio clips) that drive home the fundamentally emotional
message: Trump's policy at the border is different, and obscenely
wrong, because it produces the palpable effect of sobbing children.
People who choose
to make children sad, moreover, are monsters. Thus, Trump is the
worst of the worst and the lowest of the low. The evidence of bawling
toddlers only confirms what leftists already know to be true.
The natural
rejoinder to this strange species of sentimentality is this: lots of
things make children cry, and lots of children are crying, both in
this country and in others. Why, then, does the suffering only of the
children who can credibly be called victims of Trumpism merit our
attention and remedial action?
As
“Angels Moms” demonstrated on Friday, June 22nd
in an event hosted by President Trump, a strong case can be made that
illegal immigrants can
just as easily be the cause
of misery, both for children and adults, as they are victims of
mistreatment. Angel Moms are U.S. mothers who have lost children to
illegal alien criminals. Surely they, who have been permanently
separated from their kids (at least in this life), have an even
greater claim to public sympathy than those temporarily detained at
the border, no? No, indeed, as the mainstream media sees it, because
crimes committed by illegal immigrants are a non-issue. Why? Because
to mention them makes advocates of “undocumented immigrants” sad
and/or angry, and clearly we can't have that. Some tears, it seems,
are worthier than others.
The broader implication of the Left's politics of despair is, of
course, that conservatism, Republicanism, and nationalism all yield
an aggregate quantity of crying children (and adults) far greater
than that produced by, say, liberalism, political correctness, and
socialism. In fact, though, there is not a shred of evidence to
support this generalization. There are actually plenty of reasons to
speculate that the opposite might be true.
The
100 million people killed by Marxism in the 20th
century, for instance, presumably engendered a fair amount of
despondency among their loved ones. On a lesser scale, the job losses
and economic and social dislocation fostered by the waves of illegal
immigration and one-sided trade deals beloved by liberals have also,
one assumes, caused more than a few Americans, including children, to
bemoan their fates. And yet, for some strange reason, the raw
negative emotions produced by left-wing fiascos has never been
considered newsworthy. C'est
la vie.
To
argue the same point from another perspective, how many Americans,
including children, have been cheered by Donald Trump's election and
its innumerable positive ramifications? How many children on the
Korean Peninsula, and beyond, may sleep more soundly, may shed fewer
tears, because of President Trump's decision to pursue
denuclearization and a rapprochement
with Kim Jong-un? How many children, adolescents, and young adults
have been heartened to see job prospects improve, both for them and
for their parents, because of the booming economy that Trump presides
over? How many children walk to school or play in neighborhood parks
with a greater sense of safety and well-being, because the Trump
administration is vigorously deporting MS-13 thugs, instead of making
excuses for them and shielding them from immigration authorities, as
liberal “sanctuary” mayors and governors do every day? How many
children have been liberated from stultifying, crime-infested public
schools, and instead were able to attend private or religious
schools, or be home-schooled, because of the farsighted policies of
this administration? And, at the end of the day, how many children
may, if Trump gets to appoint even one more Supreme Court Justice,
experience the joys of life itself, because they were saved from
abortion-on-demand?
It is not hard, as we see here, to argue that it is liberals and the
Democratic Party that are the true enemies of children, and the more
reliable instigators of their tears. In truth, though, these are
still the arguments of sentimentalists and hucksters. They carry
little weight, rationally speaking, because they are overwhelmingly
based on anecdotes and emotional manipulation, not hard evidence and
a balanced consideration of pros and cons. They are, in other words,
the arguments of children, and those who think like them, not mature
adults.
Which
party, then, is the true champion of happiness, and which is the
architect of torment and grief? That is a question best left to
philosophers and theologians, not pundits and reporters. They may be
experts at exploiting human emotions, including grief, but when it
comes to identifying the true sources of joy and fulfillment, and of
gloom and agony, they are at
best
only as insightful as all the rest of us mere mortals. Let us hope,
therefore, that, in future they will stick to reporting the facts and
keep their preaching to themselves.
